Robut Rampage
Chapter 1
Lightning flashed. Thunder rumbled. Jazz music played in reverse from a record player in the corner of the laboratory. Electric currents arced up and down the pylons of a raised table, like a four-poster bed.
A strange machine lay inert on the table. It was built like a fridge with a radio-toaster combo for a head. Its antennae vibrated with electric current. Its lightbulb eyes began to glow. There were mechanical sounds as the robut sat up.
“At last! I’ve done it!” Professor Jonas Jupiter cackled madly. He was half-drunk on power and half-drunk on whiskey. “I was almost ready to give up. And they said it couldn’t be done!”
“Who did, Professor?”
His assistant, Skrum, belonged to some kind of arthropod species. He was a slight creature, three-feet tall. He would be taller if he weren’t perpetually hunched. He wore a pair of large lenses over his bulbous compound eyes, although some of the ommatidia had gone blind with age. He had a wiry black mustache above his mandibles and he rubbed his hands together incessantly. He hovered with a quartet of gossamer wings, bobbing nervously.
“Just say ‘And how’!” said Jupiter.
“And how?”
“Yes. When I say something you agree with, say ‘And how!’” Jonas waved vaguely at the console on the other side of the raised platform. “Run a diagnostic. Check everything from nuts to volts.”
“This endeavor has to succeed,” said Jonas to himself. He looked up through the geodesic dome atop his rented laboratory. The stars twinkled against a stained glass nebula. Earth was somewhere out there, far beyond his reach. “We’re nearly out of funding.”
“And how!” chirped Skrum.
“Just run the diagnostic, chum.”
“Voltage is holding steady. CPU processes are running at thirty percent. All readings are good, Professor,” called Skrum as he needled over the monitoring console. The robut held its clamp-like hands up to its face as they rotated and clacked.
“Can you hear me?”
Squeeeak. The robut turned its head to face the professor.
“I hear you.” Its mesh voicebox vibrated as it spoke. The sound was fuzzy, as if it were speaking through an old two-way radio.
“Can you see me?”
Its lightbulb eyes glowed in his general direction.
“I see you.”
“Can you stand?”
Clang! Clang! The robut placed two heavy, piston-like legs on the floor beside the table. It towered over the professor.
“I stand.”
Skrum was trembling at the console. “Professor! Something is wrong. These command line sequences don’t make sense!”
“Not now, Skrum!”
The robut still held its clamp-hands up to its face, as if looking at them in disbelief.
“What am I?” Its voice wavered in confusion.
“You are my latest and greatest invention. You are the ultimate killing machine! ”
The robut fell to its spherical knees and shook its clamps at the sky.
“But I do not want to kill! I want to . . . MAKE MUSIC!”